(The following article by Alan Wirzbicki was posted on the Boston Globe website on March 27.)
WASHINGTON — Responsibility for maintaining Amtrak’s decaying Northeast Corridor, the nation’s busiest passenger rail line, would be transferred to the states along its route after a six-year federal rebuilding program under a plan the Bush administration will submit to Congress next month.
By Amtrak’s estimates, the popular route, which extends 456 miles from Boston to Washington, needs $2.1 billion in repairs. On-time performance for Amtrak’s Northeast trains has declined steadily over the past few years as the backlog of maintenance problems has grown.
The administration plan would provide money to replace bridges and upgrade track, according to Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, but after the transition period the annual cost of upkeep on the refurbished line could impose a huge burden on state budgets along the East Coast.
Defenders of Amtrak, which owns most of the Northeast Corridor infrastructure, criticized the plan as unworkable and state officials across the Northeast have balked at the prospect of eventually having to pay millions of dollars every year for passenger rail service.
In a news conference in Boston on Wednesday with Governor Mitt Romney, Mineta said the federal takeover of the route from Amtrak was necessary to ”bring this once great network back into a state of good repair” so that it could then be turned over to the states in good condition.
Robert Johnson, a spokesman for Mineta, said the Transportation Department had not determined how much it would cost to repair the Northeast Corridor. Under the proposal, Amtrak would be required to submit a capital improvement plan to the department within six months of the bill’s passage, Johnson said.
Last summer, Amtrak president David Gunn estimated that after years of deferred maintenance, the railroad needed $4.7 billion in capital improvements over the next five years, including $2.1 billion for infrastructure repairs in the Northeast.
In addition to Amtrak, the MBTA and commuter railroads in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Baltimore use the Northeast Corridor tracks.
Under the administration’s plan, after the six-year period the states would be expected to form a multistate compact that would hire Amtrak or a private firm to operate the route. In his remarks with Romney, Mineta cited the MBTA commuter rail system, which is owned by a government agency but operated by a private company, as a model of how the Bush administration envisioned the restructured Northeast Corridor operating.
Former Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis, a member of Amtrak’s board during the Clinton administration, said he welcomed the Bush administration’s willingness to commit money to passenger rail, but said that the proposed reorganization would be too complicated and that states would be unwilling or unable to pay.
”Finally this administration is prepared to invest some serious capital into the system,” Dukakis said. ”What I hope will happen now is that a very strong bipartisan majority in Congress will pick up on that, forget about this restructuring foolishness, and get serious about putting that money into the system.”
James E. Coston, a Chicago lawyer who served as a Democratic appointee to the Amtrak Reform Council, said the administration’s plan would be a ”sea change” for rail service in the Northeast that could leave the states with huge bills.
”It would be an enormous capital undertaking for the states to have ownership and control, even on a collective basis,” Coston said.
Coston said he supported the plan to turn the route over to the states because ”Congress is never going to give Amtrak enough money to build and support the Northeast Corridor.”
On the rest of Amtrak’s 23,000-mile network, which carried 25 million passengers last year, the Bush administration’s plan would provide matching grants to states that want to hire Amtrak or another carrier to run passenger trains, but would not continue federal funding for long-distance trains.
In recent years, many states already have moved in that direction, subsidizing trains that Amtrak otherwise would not offer.
Two New England states, Vermont and Maine, currently pay Amtrak to provide passenger rail service. Under the Bush plan, other companies would be allowed to bid for those routes on an equal footing with Amtrak.
At present, Amtrak is the only feasible operator of those routes because it has a favorable deal for access to the track owned by freight railroads.
Charlie Miller, the rail program manager for the Vermont Agency of Transportation, said the state was happy with the state- subsidized Amtrak trains that serve Burlington and Rutland, but that if a better offer from a competitor came along, ”I think we would certainly want to look at that.”
Freight railroads oppose the administration’s proposal to open their tracks to other carriers, which an industry spokeswoman said would endanger safety on the nation’s rails.
Peggy Wilhide, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Railroads, said, ”If it’s the policy of our country to have a national passenger rail system, it ought to be under one entity — not broken into 50 different systems around the country.”